This is the part where I say something about myself. You can read it if you want to.

I still remember the first time I went to Destructoid. When one of the very first articles that greeted me was something about an erotic Minecraft tribute to a certain someone, I knew right away that this was the kind of gaming community that I would proudly associate myself with.

After about a year of lurking, I finally joined the community a few weeks before E3 2013 because I thought it would be cool to make cheeky jokes about the Xbox One. Now, I'm still here, making dumb comments and posting fan art whenever I feel like it.

I enjoy weird-ass Japanese games like Ace Attorney, Bayonetta and Yakuza. My favourite genre in the videoed games are the games where you're playing a role in the game you're playing and numbers come out when you hit the guy on the screen. I also like those games where you have a guy with a sword and you run around and it's super hard and you feel bad about yourself because you die all the time.

I dislike military first-person shooters and shooters in general mostly because I suck at them. I hardly play online multiplayer games because I'm shy. My favourite Pokémon is Minccino because look at this animated sprite:
But I think I like Emolga more now because:

I've tuned in to my fair share of video game playing personalities in the past. Most of which I still follow to this day. First, I discovered The Angry Video Game Nerd after seeing countless of "This guy ripped off AVGN!" comments on Irate Gamer videos. I don't remember how I found out about Irate Gamer though. Then I caught wind of Two Best Friends Play in 2013, which quickly became one of my favourites. I also found out about JonTron a few months ago and worked my way through his channel and some episodes and best-of compilations from his time in Game Grumps. Now, I'm once again (very) late to the party and have just found out about this great show.

Started in 2003, predating the era of Let's Players, Angry Nerd personas and even YouTube itself, Game Center CX is a TV show starring Shinya Arino, who's employed in a fictional company which the show is named after. "Arino's Challenge" is the main feature of the program, where he sits in an office and marathons a game to reach its ending or complete a certain challenge within the game. With him not being very good at games, the "You have to reach the ending" rule is often taken to its most literal interpretation, employing any means necessary to reach that goal, seeking help from strategy guides and his many assistant directors, who would sometimes even play through hard segments for him, whenever he gets stuck. So long as the last segment which leads to the ending screen is done by him.

They also have lots of fun with the title cards.

The show has gotten quite popular, his green uniform, orange tie and penchant for cooling pads iconic among fans. It's still going strong after 18 seasons and several specials and live events. A movie is supposedly on its way. And it has games too! You may know it more for its Western title, Retro Game Challenge.

The challenge portions were not actually the main draw from the start and it's focus was initially on featuring various Japanese game companies, detailing its history, conducting interviews and whatnot. Challenging a game from that company was just one small part of it. From season 2 onwards, Arino's Challenge is now the highlight, accompanied by several side segments that serve as nice breaks between the playthrough and makes it more akin to a variety show than just a Let's Play. Still focused on retro games, some segments retain the spirit of the first season with more developer interviews. Some are as simple as a brief showcase of a handful of games from a certain system, company or time period. One popular segment is "You Should Visit This Game Center Sometime", a travelogue where they visit arcades, stores or other places around Japan that feature retro games and other things of note, as recommended by a viewer. I found these segments quite interesting because you can see that there are tons of games that never made it outside Japan. Later seasons introduced sillier segments like "Shocking Videos MAX" where they show gruesome, SHOCKING scenes in video games such as crashing your bike in Excitebike, or "Family Computer Sniper" where he plays sniper using an SNES Super Scope and tries to identify game cartridges from afar.

The corporate/office theme adds a lot to the show's charm. Their silly antics and the fun and colourful atmosphere of most games are made even more off-beat by the serious, formal and "professional" tone they try to practice being in a workplace environment (which they almost always never manage to keep a straight face whenever they do so). That mixture of seriousness and silliness is something I observe quite often in Japanese humor and I'm a really big fan of it. Arino himself is a very charming guy. His laid-back, clumsy and often childish personality is what makes the show, watching him react to things with such bluntness, wonder and enthusiasm. After all these years, his skills never seem to improve and yet somehow, out of sheer tenacity, he usually manages to succeed, after several continuous hours of playing. They make sure that fact is known, telling how much time has elapsed, how many attempts he's made at one segment or showing it slowly getting dark outside the building. Plus, the way the show is presented along with the epic and dramatic delivery of the narrator throughout the whole ordeal, even when cracking a joke, is icing on the cake. It gets you more invested in his struggle and really makes you feel like you're watching so much more than just some guy playing games that are almost as old as he is.

I finished watching all of season 1's challenges, the entirety of season 2, as well as a couple of odd episodes here and there, and I think the show shines most when covering games of special interest, like an episode where he plays a jogging marathon with the Japanese Power Pad, or the ones where he plays adventure games or dating sims.

Needless to say, I highly encourage you to watch it. Definitely one of the best video game shows I've seen yet. I guess I also have to give a shout-out to Nanashi for passively introducing me to this show. Sometimes, an offhand comment or picture is all you really need to get acquainted to and eventually engrossed in a certain thing.

Last October, I started this series called “Google Play-giarism”, born out of those dead hours of the afternoon spent looking at bad knock-off games at the Google Play store. As someone with an interest in art, drawing, etc., They’ve always fascinated me. Playing this little game of “where did they copy this from?” gives me a sort of inside look at the creative process behind that ultimately bad or lacking piece of art. It’s even quite educational. It shows us how not to use another work as reference for yours.

Anyway, I dropped the “Google” part of the title, as I plan to expand this series outside the mobile games market, for this particular entry at the very least. Not that I fear copyright infringement or anything like that. Dropped the dash as well, because the logo looks better without it. Yeah, we have a logo now, I hope you like it.

Sometime last month. I was walking around the food court of some mall and stopped dead on my tracks upon seeing this one game through the glass panels of some old, backwards arcade.

Finding any information on it was quite difficult, at least on the English speaking side of the internet. With only that English text on the logo to work with, all I saw was a very short thread on Shoryuken, an official English site with barely any info, and official videos whose quality are so bad, they might as well have not uploaded them.

After Google’s image-based translation failed to recognize the text on the logo, I managed to find the Chinese title by browsing the Japanese version of the official site, of all places. Googled that text. Clicked on the first YouTube link and, oh my God.

Without further ado, I present to you, 三国演武 (Chaos Generation; alternate title, not a translation).

Where do we even start?

From the opening, though a bit faint, we can see the it's trying to evoke the same grainy, "painted" style as SFIV's opening, especially with the flames and other effects.

Win poses. Though anyone can raise their left arm in triumph, this particular one looks very close to Ryu's. Not to mention his colour scheme is rather similar.

Seth's win pose. Raise from the ground, raise arms to sides.

Basically the Brazil stage. Notice the bridge where the characters fight.

Vietnam. Same general concept. Riding a boat on a river on sunset, surrounded by grassy mountains and rock formations. The boat is less detailed but the flooring is similar.

China stage. But in this game, of course all the stages are in China. Both have a restaurant in it.

The moves are a bit more interesting. While some are direct copies from SFIV and other games, other copy only (parts of) the animation and do something slightly different with them. This one has the same ending as El Fuerte's Flying Giga Buster, but the toss at the beginning is different.

Gen's Crane Style ultras where combined into one. Turn into a tornado, then slice them up.

Shin Shoryuken. It copies the startup on point.

But leaves the opponent in the air and catches them in a similar manner to the ending of Dudley's Corkscrew Cross. In here, he throws a fireball with his punch though.

I only ran through a handful of them for this blog. I'm sure plenty of you SFIV players and other fighting game fans have already recognized many other things from the video. But guess what? That same channel has move videos for every character in the game. All 10 of them. So stay tuned. We'll go through every one them some other time.

First of, due to Steam's new policy on trading games, we'll no longer push through with the "secret" part of this little gift giving activity. While rules on gifting remain remain unchanged, we'll still encounter problems if our deliverer happens to already own the game you intend to gift, in which case he won't be able to receive it (something you should keep in mind as well when choosing your gifts).

So yeah, send your gift(s) directly to the person.

But before that, pick a gift box!

Each box contains the name of one person from our list of participants. That person will then send you their gift if you happen to chose their number. Our third party, OpiumHerz, has the numbered list of names (arranged at random). I'll get whichever box is left.

Remember, the idea is to gift a game that you want others to suffer through experience. But you can give them something they actually want, if that's what you prefer. You're all big boys and girls now. You can do what you want.List of participants:(PMs Sent!)

Making this last call a bit earlier because I'll be out starting tomorrow, December 27. Because, you know, it's already the 26th. Right now. So yeah, if you want to join, just say so in the comments section below. I'll stop by every once in a while whenever I have internet, so rest assured I'll still see your comment. But I'll be back home (where I have a PC to work with) on December 1. Because of that, we might start a day after instead (December 2). So you have until then to sign up.

In the meantime, I got Dtoid forum admin and fellow C-Blog posting person OpiumHerz to be the deliverer of everyone's gifts, so you won't know (right away) who sent you that copy of Bad Rats.

Basically, what will happen is once you have your gift, send it to him on Steam and he'll then send it to your recipient ASAP. No, this is not a scam ;) Rest assured, if he screws up, we agreed that he'll surrender all his forum admin powers to me.

It's almost that time of the year again! That's right, an excuse to post this video:

I watch this every Christmas.

Serendipity is a word that I never get to use ever in a sentence. It is a term that means a "pleasant surprise" or as I like to call it, a "happy accident". When it comes to games, I too had my fair share of happy accidents, enjoying games I got in some giveaway or coerced by a friend to try it, games I would never have decided to check out for myself.

This happy accident, the joy of trying new things, this is something I want to share this Christmas season. And I wish for you all to experience and share this feeling too.

This is inspired from a dumb thing we used to do in school as to assure that everyone in class gets a Christmas present. Yes, even that weird kid that no one likes who eats lunch alone.

What if I was that weird kid???

[Insecurity Intensifies]

...

So our "Secret Santa" was a little bit different. What we would do is buy our gifts prior to knowing who we'll give it to. That's because you'll pass your gift to a random person. It lead to scenarios where a guy gets an NBA jigsaw puzzle when they don't even like Basketball, or getting girls cologne but you're a guy. While it sounds awful on paper, I think if we do this for videogames it can be quite interesting, discovering games you've never heard of or ever thought of playing. And through blogs, you can share your experience with this newfound game.

We will follow a similar format:

1. Buy a game you want other people to suffer through experience. You're free to pick any game, but I would suggest something relatively obscure and not a lot of people have tried yet. Since this is just for a fun little blog thing, I would advise not to spend too much on it. I myself am planning to spend no more than $10-20 for my gift.

Digital games, by the way. Like Steam or whatever.

2. Everyone will be assigned a random person to give their gift to. You'll find out later how we'll go about this random draw.

3. I (or to not spoil the surprise for myself, some third party, who will also handle the random draw) will PM each participant with:

a. Who to give their gift to; andb. Who to expect a gift from (just to make sure you don't end up adding some random stranger on Steam)*

You're then free to send your gift anytime once you receive the PM.

*We can also do what we decided in the forums (which follows the more traditional format) where there would be a "deliverer" of the gifts as to keep things more "secret". Everyone sends their gifts to that person and they'll then send it to your target recipient.

4. Once you receive your gift, you'll have to play it no matter what it is. And because we're a blogging community, you then have to write about your experience with said game.

We'll start on December 1. Next week, I'll make a last call for anyone else who wants to sign up.___________________________________________________________________________________

Well conditional pass. Still a ton of revisions to the document (as expected, really), but the hard part is over. It's as good as done. This means I'll finally graduate from college early next year! Just 3 more leftover classes to finish.

While I'm not quite fond of using internet memes and image macros, this one in particular I believe is a close approximation of how I feel right now. That burden you had to carry these past four (almost five) years, (almost) off your shoulders. Those groupmates of mine and our adviser are trully unbelievable in every sense of the word and I literally wouldn't have made it without them.___________________________________________________________________________________

I haven't been very active in the C-Blogs lately, aside of upvoting a couple of blogs, at least not as active as I want to be. In fact, I don't think I've posted often on the FP as well and I apologize for that. See that V sign? Yeah, that's not a V sign, that's a two. That's approximately the number of weeks I've been out. Been on the forums as usual though and maybe you should too maybe. You can talk about whatever, videogames, annie may and maybe not the current controversies going on in gaming media. Please.

So... life. It like, happened, you know?

I find it hard to believe that I've been going in and out of this university for almost five years now. If we're only concerned about my academics and the time I spent as a student, I can't exactly say that these past five years have been much of a highlight for me. The past three in paricular I'd say has been the most soulless and unfulfilling part of my life so far, as my interest in this college course gradually tapered off to the absolute zero that it is now, and at the same time, I struggle to find what I really want to do in my life instead. The closest friends I had in that establishment were literally the only reason why I still kept going to school and now that they've graduated on time earlier this year, I hardly have any motivation to continue nowadays, let alone perform well in my remaining classes.

With that said, I find even harder to believe that all of that is now one step closer to coming to an end. Because somehow, last Wednesday, me and my three groupmates managed to submit our completed thesis document, one of the last few things I needed to accomplish before I graduate. Three copies in a brown envelope, received and stamped by some lady in the office and submitted 20 minutes before the deadline. It's rushed as hell and will probably require a ton of revisions, but I still find it unbelievable that we actually made the deadline. Such amazing crammers these groupmates of mine are. We probably made way more progress in these last two weeks than we did in the past three months. Say what you will about our horrible work ethic, but I am very much happy and grateful to have these people as my thesis group. Without going into too much detail, I can honestly say that if it wasn't for them, my college life would've been over three years ago.

The trip back home after submitting the document was a strange one indeed. I know for a fact that I was ecstatic at that moment. I was in a dream-like state of disbelief after what just transpired. But I couldn't express any of those emotions because I was way too tired and exhausted. Then I got home and slept for 18 hours.

Thesis defense is on Wednesday and I don't have high hopes for it, to be honest. I don't think we'll be off the hook just yet but regardless...

Some of the blog stuff I plan to accomplish:

Yeah. This was supposed to go up during the Halloween season.

I have another one of those Play-giarisims coming up, probably the last one for a while. I've already run through a good portion of the newest and top games lists and I don't have enough material for yet another one after this. Need to wait until I have a newer set of games to look at, especially ones that are actually worth commenting on. I mean, there are like a million Minecraft clones out there but really, there's not much to say about any of them aside from looking and playing like the real thing and having some variation of "craft" in their title. I gotta say though, as someone who's not much of a fan of mobile games, browsing the Play Store and making fun of the dubious games you find on it has been one of the more entertaining uses I found for this tablet of mine.

In the meantime, why not go check out the first two parts of this series, now would ya?Part 1 | Part 2

I couple of months back, I posted the first part of what was supposed to be a full playthrough of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the GBA. Unfortunately, you won't be seeing anymore of those because I'm not longer pushing through with it. *click* There goes the screenshots.

I think I overestimated the game's ability to be hilariously bad enough to be worth writing a series of blogs on. I started working on the second part not long after I posted the first one and desparately scoured for things to say about it. Suffice to say, there hardly were any. This might as well be one of, if not, the worst game I've ever played. It's the worst kind of bad game, the one that's not even bad in an entertaining way and is just plain boring and unremarkable.

For 4-5 hours, you go through 20 something chapters which more often than not comprise of you being told to go to some place, while being sidetracked to do a bunch of minigames. Some of them include: match the pictures, press the button on screen, connect the dots, click on the thing when it lights up, and something-like-what-you-do-in-DDR-where-you-press-the-button-when-it-reaches-that-part-of-the-screen, whose proper name for that kind of gameplay completely escapes me right now. You also have an RPGs fight every once in a while where Draco and friends are literally the only three enemies you fight for the entire game until the finale.

At around the end, the game even becomes self-aware and expresses pitty for the person who decided to play this game to completion. So yeah, I've had enough of that. Plus, at this point I don't recall some parts of it anymore which means if I do want to finish this blog series, I'll have to play through it all again.

With Christmas season right around the corner, I am planning to do another playthrough of a some RPG I haven't played/finished yet, something that became sort of a tradition I do every year. With the game I have in mind, that means I have to make another dumb character again, which I'm pretty terrible at. So this time, I'm thinking of inserting someone I know into the game. I'll turn them into a girl.

Speaking of Christmas, we're organizing a Secret Santa for Steam/Digital games in the forums. Just a fun little thing to do for the holiday season. Maybe you can join in if you want to. I dunno. Its your life. You make the decisions. You're a big boy now. While ironing out some of the details, I thought of doing a similar activity for this C-Blog community to mess around with for a bit. Something about exchanging obscure/shitty games and writing about your experience with it. Stay tuned. I'll post it within the next few weeks maybe? Though I can really put it out now and start building up a list of participants.

I have many other stuff in mind, monthly musings, personal stuff, whatever, that I can't share yet since I haven't done much work on them aside from "Yep. That's the title." Hopefully, I can get them all out before... wow, six more weeks before this year ends.